Entries categorized under “Electronic Discovery”

Backup problems are supposed to be gone, right? All you have to do is throw in some disk and a good dose of deduplication and organizational backup problems will magically disappear. So while that may be true up to a point, today's newly released Information Management Health Check survey conducted by Applied Research and sponsored by Symantec reveals that organizations are failing to take into account the implications of what infinite backup retention periods mean for them long term. (read more)

Sometimes when you find a good thing you have to roll with it and that is exactly what DCIG plans to do with its new line of Buyer's Guide products. Last month DCIG announced the availability of its first ever Buyer's Guide of any kind for either storage or ESI products. Since then its reception among storage providers and end-users alike has so surpassed our expectations that DCIG has decided to expand the scope of these offerings. It is for that reason DCIG is today pleased to announce that it is beginning research and plans to bring to market by the end of 2010 four more DCIG Buyer's Guides. (read more)

As more organizations consolidate servers and create private storage clouds to store the data associated with these servers, the need to lock down that data to meet emerging data governance and eDiscovery demands has grown more acute. It is for reasons like these that features such as 3PAR's new Virtual Lock are becoming more sought after on storage systems. (read more)

I am playing the role of road warrior this week by attending two conferences. The first two days of this week I was attending Storage Networking World (SNW) 2010 in Orlando, FL, and then today I hopped on a direct flight Las Vegas to catch one day of the Symantec Vision conference. (read more)

It is time for organizations to heed the calls to take a proactive position on data management and preservation. While the sirens have been wailing for a number of years about the risks of not putting in place a comprehensive data management solution, too many organizations have failed to heed these warnings. Now a recent landmark opinion has dramatically altered the data management and preservation landscape by making it a necessity for organizations to implement a comprehensive, singular data management solution like CommVault® Simpana®. (read more)

Best practices for data management call for organizations to definitely not keep data that they do not need. On the surface, this approach sounds good but as organizations face growing stores of inactive data, they may not know who owns the data, what its value is, what risks it presents or which applications within the organization need to access the data? (read more)

Over the last few years I thought I had seen just about every (well, maybe not every but most) automated eDiscovery, data classification, data management, data preservation and search engine technology on the market. But the introduction of today's Data Insight technology from Symantec into Data Loss Protection (DLP) software seeks to address possibly one of the most basic data classification questions of them all: Who owns the data? (read more)

Small, mid-sized and large enterprises are not the only ones looking to consolidate and simplify their IT management to create more cohesive management solutions. In the last few years, Symantec has been taking many of the same steps to integrate components of its Backup Exec, Enterprise Vault and NetBackup product suites to deliver solutions appropriate for the different size organizations that it serves. The progress that it has made in delivering on these ideals is reflected in today's Backup Exec 2010 and NetBackup 7 product releases. (read more)

The issue of attorney-client privilege remains one of the most revered privileges that the American judicial system bestows upon clients as it enables any person to communicate open and honestly with his/her attorney. Now this right is under scrutiny as keeping communications between a defendant and his/her attorney has become difficult to achieve due to the increased role that email plays as a form of primary communication medium between them. (read more)

Just how significant is today's announced technology partnership between CommVault and Informatica? Pretty big. The most obvious benefit that it provides to CommVault® Simpana® users is a new option that they can leverage to archive structured data while still managing and searching it using their Simpana software. (read more)

IT's role in the enterprise has changed dramatically in just the last few years - most notably in its responsibilities and workloads. No longer is it enough for IT to manage data protection recovery, networks, systems, and storage, but its responsibilities have expanded as it has merged with other operational and strategic business functions. This is forcing IT to develop a holistic understanding of the needs of the entire organization to ensure that the technology it deploys meets those needs as well as aligns with the larger company strategy. (read more)

Organizations across the United States have steadily felt the sting of legal action involving eDisocovery as they are quickly discovering that it is no easy feat to comply with mandates such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). This is resulting in mounting sanctions and a steadily decreasing patience in courts towards eDiscovery mistakes. However state and local government agencies were conspicuously absent from this steady stream of eDiscovery rulings. (read more)

Google. Yahoo! Bing. These are the search engines that people most often turn to research and find information on the Internet. But the problem with these search engines is that they make some assumptions that one cannot make when searching for data behind corporate fire walls. More specifically, when it comes to finding information within an organization, people do not even know what they need to search for so individuals almost need to be psychic when beginning their searches for this information. (read more)

No company regardless of its size is immune from the possibility of an eDiscovery. But even as companies look to respond to eDiscovery demands placed on them by rulings such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), an equally vexing problem that they face is making sense of their growing mountain of email data. (read more)

I recently had an interesting conversation with an IT Director who is currently working in health care. We were discussing how his job has evolved with the complexity associated with EMR (electronic medical record) systems and how IT in health care has been especially burdened. Beyond just playing technology catch up, there are numerous regulatory and litigation threats now hovering over it. He specifically pointed to litigation as one area that represents a growing risk to his company's business and how responding to eDiscovery requests for electronic information has become a huge burden. (read more)

Smart managers always put a large emphasis on automating whatever processes they can within their organizations and for good reasons: processes become more predictable, there is a reduced chance of human error and ultimately the business is more successful. However businesses are finding out that it may not be in their best interest to automate data classification and that for now courts still prefer people to computers when it comes to performing this particular task. (read more)

DCIG has consistently stressed the need for good eDiscovery processes for electronically stored information (ESI). A steady stream of sanctions surrounding poor eDiscovery strategies is a consistent reminder that a lack of planning can be damaging to your case. A recent case, Ferron v. EchoStar Satellite, LLC., in one such reminder that images and links in emails can be subject to eDiscovery and that the failure to preserve them could be costly. (read more)

When businesses think of Microsoft, it is not just Windows, Office or Internet Explorer that comes to mind. Increasingly it's SharePoint that they identify as one of Microsoft's most compelling solutions. Using a drive letter path for document collaboration is no longer practical in this day and age and SharePoint is now the tool to which many organizations turn to fill their collaboration needs. So while SharePoint fills this new need for many organizations, what is not so obvious to them is how to manage SharePoint so they can search, find and deliver relevant documents in a timely manner if faced with an eDiscovery request. (read more)

More enterprise organizations are examining the possibilities of storing their data to a "cloud" and archive and backup data are heading the list of the two forms of data that they are most likely to store in the cloud. But managing these two types of data once they are in the cloud is anything but a straightforward process. Different archiving and backup software solutions create their own data silos with their own data management and retention policies. This situation can create new eDiscovery and legal hold challenges that organizations are ill-prepared to deal with. (read more)

"As California goes, so goes the nation" is a phrase that I have heard before and it immediately came to mind when I read that Governor Schwarzenegger had signed California Assembly Bill 5, otherwise known as Chapter 5 - Electronic Discovery Act. Signed into law on June 29th, 2009, what makes this law significant is that it expands upon the verbiage used in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). So for organizations already worrying about the FRCP, take heed because the Electronic Discovery Act takes eDiscovery to yet another level. (read more)

To say that storage clouds are gathering in the distance is probably an understatement. Everyone is beginning to see the benefits - both technical and financial - that cloud storage provides, especially in the archiving and backup realms. But there are more factors to consider than just the underlying architecture of the provider's cloud storage offering or the price per GB. Managing and accessing data in the cloud presents entirely new risks that organizations either are still failing to address or may not even know exist. (read more)

One of the most significant areas of eDiscovery is performing a relevant keyword search of data to produce the proper documents as mandated by eDiscovery requests. This collection of ESI (electronically stored information) holds particular importance as produced documents will go through a review process prior to producing these to opposing counsel. As data continues to grow within organizations eDiscovery costs continue to rise therefore it is extremely important to have a robust search that reduces non-relevant information during a search. (read more)

A recent report from Ferris Research estimates that the total number of business e-mails sent in North America alone will surpass 139 million in 2009 and 143 million in 2010. This volume of email growth continues to put pressure on IT staff in every size organization to manage its inflow, outflow and retention. While the mechanics of managing emails inflows and outflows can be fairly straightforward, when it comes to setting policies as to how long to retain these emails, the picture can start to get a bit hazy. (read more)

Moving aging, stale or infrequently accessed data from high cost, high performance production storage to lower cost, high capacity value tiers of storage can be easy to justify in enterprise organizations. However explaining the value proposition of archiving this same data in small and midsize businesses (SMBs) is sometimes less clear-cut as they may already store aging emails and file data on low cost local hard drives, inexpensive network file servers and even with Internet cloud storage providers. (read more)

First Louisiana State Court Judge Rosemary Ledet found Dell in contempt of court; then she accused Dell of making a "mockery" of the system; and then, to give her statement some teeth, she hit Dell with a $25,000 fine. Granted, a $25,000 fine is not a huge sum of money for a company like Dell and it certainly was a lot smaller than the $182,000 requested by Plaintiff's attorneys. But the tongue lashing and ensuing fine should serve as a wake-up call to all size organizations that judicial patience in regards to eDiscovery is running thin and callous or indifferent attitudes towards eDiscovery are no longer being tolerated. (read more)